Every year, Pope Benedict XVI gives a Christmas address at the Vatican. This December, he dedicated the festive event — one of his most important annual speeches — to homophobia, with a touch of anti-abortion sentiment thrown in for good measure. Happy holidays!

According to the AP, Benedict attacked gay marriage and gay people in general for destroying the very "essence of the human creature" for being selfish enough to want to marry and adopt children. He quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gay people those sinful rights was an "attack" on the traditional family structure.

I'm so glad he quoted that particular rabbi, because I've never heard the "gays are ruining the traditional family" argument. If you're going to dedicate your big annual Christmas speech to hating millions of people and trying to limit their rights, shouldn't you come up with some more original talking points?

"People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being," he rambled on. "They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves."

Does the Pope sound like a stoned undergrad Philosophy major, or is that just me?

"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned," he continued.

Is that a reference to climate change? Speaking of, don't we have more pressing matters to consider other than gay marriage? Here are a few: Climate change. Global poverty. Genocide. Or we could get topical: Gun control. The momentous news that the Pope gets more retweets than Justin Bieber. It's so frustrating that the Pope has the rapt attention of masses of people around the world and he thinks the best way to help them, as a global leader, is to regurgitate an antiquated message that he knows — he must know — is increasingly irrelevant.

(Well, he also recently released an "annual peace message" in which he said abortion and euthanasia were threats to world peace. Maybe I'm being too harsh.)

The Pope must know that no one is listening to him because, in Europe alone, gay marriage is legal in the very Roman Catholic Spain, the British government is planning on introducing a bill legalizing gay marriage next year, and France's President Francois Hollande has a "marriage for everyone" plan that he's promised to implement before May. Yet, Benedict continues to rant on, because he can.

"When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God," he said.